Davee Bee Self Portrait

This is a self portrait to be used for my profile images. I never meant for it to be in WIP. So here it is in the project area now.

I keep this self portrait in my gallery because it's the first true test I gave myself to make a digital painting. Prior to this, I was trying without much success. I kept telling myself that I shouldn't need a reference so I would almost always try to come up with something out of nowhere… then get the values wrong, use the wrong brushes for the job, and wind up with something far from what I meant to create. Here's an example below…

… These two attempts were made the same day. Not joking. I was so frustrated that the tools weren't doing what I thought they would. I did some heavy research on how to improve my digital painting. Obviously there are plenty of resources out there, but the one that stuck out the most was CtrlPaint.com. I watched about an hour of free videos on that site and was immediately enlighten as to what I was doing wrong to get the results I wanted. Do yourself a favor… If you are trying to self-teach digital painting, that website is your one stop shop.